Scientific Papers
Many scientists, hydrogeologists, engineers and other highly qualified professionals in this field, firmly believe that the GAB waters are of plutonic origin, and are not recharging from surface rainwater, as is claimed by the govt. That the waters are ancient and finite, and come from within the earth’s crust. This theory (and supporting evidence and data) has been clearly presented to governments for over a century – but has been dismissed and ignored, while the wastage of these precious waters continues.
Below are some of the scientific papers, and writings of various scientists, about the Basin.
Professor Lance Endersbee.
Emeritus Professor Endersbee AO, FTSE, Hon FIE Aust., Hon MEI Canada, F. ASCE is a civil engineer of long experience in water resources development. His early professional career included service with the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority, the Hydro-Electric Commission of Tasmania and the United Nations in South-East Asia as an expert on dam design and hydro power development.
He is former Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Melbourne’s Monash University, and former Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University. He was awarded an AO (Officer, Order of Australia) for his services to engineering and education. He is a world authority on rock behaviour and tunnelling, and former President of the Institution of Engineers Australia, where he received the institution’s Peter Nicol Russell Memorial Medal – its highest award. He has spent thousands of hours deep underground while managing and advising on major dam and power generation projects in Australia, the Mekong, the United States and elsewhere. His fields of specialisation include the management of planning and design of major economic development projects, water resources, energy engineering and transport engineering. He has been associated with the design and construction of several large dams and underground power station projects and other major works in civil engineering and mining in Australia, Canada, Asia and Africa.
In 2005 he published a book, A Voyage of Discovery, a history of ideas about the earth, with a new understanding of the global resources of water and petroleum, and the problems of climate change.
As Professor Swan AO, FAA, FTSE, former Dean of the Faculty of Science at Monash University said, “This book’s most important warning is that the world’s groundwater is being mined to exhaustion, and that the hydrologists’ promise that it can be replaced by seasonal rain is fatally flawed.” This impressive book provides evidence that we are on the edge of a huge, little understood catastrophe. To purchase this brilliant book, contact GABPG (info@gabpg.org.au).
To quote from one of Endersbee’s papers, re the Govt. diagram on its theory of recharge:
“There are several aspects of the Queensland Government diagram which convey a false impression. It has a greatly exaggerated vertical scale, which is not stated. If the diagram were drawn to a natural scale it would appear as a single line across the page. The diagram takes no account of the difference in relative density of the water (1.0) and the rocks (2.6). It carries the implied assumption that the pressure head of the seepage water from the intake beds, less friction losses all the way, would be sufficient to overcome the stresses in the rock at the base of the borehole, which is a physical impossibility.
The sediments are normally consolidated. The water that was in these sediments at the time of deposition has been slowly squeezed out over geological time. Some of the sediments were derived from clays, and these consolidate to form strata that are highly impervious, and quite plastic. Such mudstone rocks can create impervious blankets over vast distances, and this is obviously the case in the Great Artesian Basin”.
Links to papers by Professor Endersbee
The source of water in the Great Artesian Basin must be plutonic
Australia’s Artesian Basin – $14 Billion down the drain each year
http://www.atse.org.au:80/index.php?sectionid=449
http://www.atse.org.au:80/index.php?sectionid=613
http://www.atse.org.au/index.php?sectionid=614
http://www.atse.org.au/index.php?sectionid=426
http://www.atse.org.au/index.php?sectionid=404
Links to articles by Prof. Endersbee
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=993
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/nt/stories/s732649.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/groundwater/default.htm
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=1215
http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/36118/subdr223.pdf
Link to article re Endersbee’s book.
http://www.cecaust.com.au/pubs/pdfs/nce03-06.pdf
http://www.monash.edu.au/news/newsline/story/689
Online Forum discussing Endersbee’s views:
http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/scribblygum-old/posts/topic8874.shtm
Professor John Walter Gregory, FRS. DSc.
In 1899 Gregory was appointed Professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne. His qualifications for the apppointment were so outstanding that the London committee did not interview any of the other candidates. His book “The Great Rift Valley” (published 1896) told of his excursion to the Rift Valley in Kenya, the nearby volcanoes, lava fields, geothermal springs and the glaciers of Mt. Kenya – he was the first scientific explorer in this region.
The geology of Australia became his new field of exploration, and in 1901-02 he travelled to Lake Eyre and studied the artesian bores there. He wrote a book about this trip, “The Dead Heart of Australia”, published 1906. His studies of the GAB have not been equalled in 100 years. Following are some quotations from his book:
“Subterranean water may be derived from one of two sources. Cool water, which occurs at comparatively slight depths, is no doubt, generally, rain-water ….As this water comes originally from the sky it is called ‘meteoric’ water..
The second source of subterranean water is the interior of the earth. The rocks of the deeper layers of the earth’s crust contain water. The quartz in granite owes its milky whiteness to abundant minute cavities, filled with water. The vast steam cloud, which hangs over volcanoes,…has no doubt been brought.. from the interior of the earth.
Plutonic waters are especially important in mining countries, because most of the chief ore-deposits are due to them. And as the deep, water-bearing basin of Central Australia is surrounded on all sides by rocks containing rich mineral veins – from the Queensland gold-fields on the east, the Cobar copper-field and Broken Hill in the south, and the Cloncurry god-field in the west -, there is likely to be a considerable amount of plutonic water under Central Australia.
Where these ascending waters are cut off from the surface by an overlying sheet of clay, they accumulate in any porous beds they can enter, and remain in them subject to high pressure. Any plutonic water rising from the old rocks of Central Australia would collect in the permeable beds of sandstone beneath the clays. Thence it would rush to the surface, if a bore-hole were made through the water-tight cap above, just as oil and natural gas escape from the wells of the Caspian and Pennysylvania….
The explanation of the flowing wells of Central Australia as due to water-pressure in the distant Queensland hills is met by many difficulties. One of the chief is, that it under-rates the resistance to the flow of water through rocks due to friction. The analogy between the geological structure of eastern Australia and a U-tube fails, because Australia is not built up of tubes. The water has to percolate, not through open tubes, but through the pores of rocks; and as these rocks are under the pressure of sometimes as much as four or five thousand feet of overlying material the pores will be minute.
The average increase of temperature below the surface of the ground is generally taken as 1degree F for every 53 feet in depth…But many of the flowing wells in Australia show the rate of one degree F for every twenty-two feet. This high temperature indicates that the water has probably come from a much greater depth than that of the water-bearing layer. It is, therefore, more likely to be plutonic than meteoric water…
The association of compressed gas with the artesian waters has been denied or doubted, but it is admitted that many of the well-waters smell of sulphuretted hydrogen. Many of the Queensland waters are charged with carbonic acid.
I long hesitated before finally rejecting the ordinary artesian theory of the Central Australian wells, The question is not merely one of settling a theoretical explanation. It has an important practical bearing. Many of these wells now run to waste.
This waste is defended on the ground that the water is being renewed at a rate which so vastly exceeds the outflow from the wells, that they will last for ever without any diminished flow…
Legislation to stop this waste has twice been proposed. A Bill was carried through the Queensland Assembly in 1891; but the Legislative Council rejected it. In New South Wales a similar Bill was proposed in 1894, which would have authorised the Water-conservation Department to order the partial closing of the wells; but it also failed to pass.
Nature has stored up a vast – but probably a limited – supply in a safe, underground reservoir. But to allow these deep-well waters – in obedience to a mistaken analogy as to their origin – to run heedlessly to waste, is a policy of which a later generation of Australians may have bitter cause for complaint.”
End of quotes from Professor Gregory.